Dana Cree works through the growing pains of a dairy start-up.

March 14, 2016

The Waiting Game

Dana Cree works through the growing pains of a dairy start-up.

March 14, 2016

In 2015, Dana made the leap from restaurants to the world of dairy, leaving her post as pastry chef at Chicago's Blackbird for a position as Culinary Director for 1871 Dairy. She is documenting the weird and awesome transition from kitchen to milking parlor here on ChefsFeed.

I’ve
hesitated to write anything about my new job at the dairy because, well, it’s
kind of boring.

Most
of my days are now spent moving things around, because it turns out that’s all working
for a dairy is: moving milk around. We move it out of the cows, into a holding
tank, then move the raw milk into pasteurizers, which empty into semi-automated
bottling machines. The milk is then moved into bottles, moved to our storage coolers,
picked up for deliveries, placed on a truck, delivered to restaurants, coffee
shops, and grocery stores, where ultimately, it’s moved—one last time—into a
customer’s hands.

So
while my job is to develop the products we will eventually sell at 1871 Dairy,
until we finish building out our dairy plant in the west loop of Chicago, I
wait.

While
I wait, I work on a line of pie-bottomed yogurts with a local pie shop. I go to
ice cream college, and learn how to manufacture ice cream with pasteurizers and
homogenizers, instead of just making small batches of the stuff on the stove
like I’ve done as a pastry chef. I spend time on the farm, hang out in the
milking parlor with the ladies, then pasteurize and bottle their milk — and I dream
up flavors for that 100% grass-fed milk: deep Askinosie chocolate, donut,
vanilla chai…but all that won’t roll off the bottling line until it’s actually
built.

All that aside, I’m enjoying the kind of daily life I only dreamt of when working
in restaurants. I’ve seen more friends in the last three months than I have in
the entire four years I’ve been in Chicago. I’ve had the time and energy to be
active, and shed more than a few of the pounds that came with a job that
required you to taste desserts day after day after day. I feel more like myself
than I have in years.
At
the same time, every time I see a beautiful new dessert posted on a friend’s
social media account, I get vicious pangs of jealousy. I miss making desserts.
I miss the hustle and bustle of the kitchen, and the immense feelings of
accomplishment every shift in a kitchen brings. I love the ladies, but it’s
safe to say the cows don’t do anything quickly.

The
learning curve has been steep. Six months into this endeavor, we were reminded that cows stop producing milk when they get pregnant — after mistakenly purchasing 14 cows that all gave birth at the same time. There was
no milk for two months before their calves were born, and our milk production
dropped to 80 gallons a week; not even close to enough to service the small
client base we had built. We made more apologies than we ever hope to again.

There
was also the time I drove seven hours to the farm in Wisconsin to make a batch
of eggnog for the holiday season. I hand-cracked 400 eggs, grated half a pound
of nutmeg, pasteurized 100 gallons, and just before it was ready to be bottled,
the hose popped loose and the nog was gratuitously pumped onto the floor. My
heart still ached the next day over the loss, my own ignorance about tightening
gaskets the sole culprit.
On
some of the coldest days this winter, the milk froze on the delivery truck. If
you know what happens when liquid freezes, you’ll see this coming: the expanded
milk cracked all the glass jars. Pallets of ruined jars is bad enough, but
freezing also damages the fat in the milk. So even if the the glasses hadn’t cracked, it still wouldn’t be
something we could sell.

Oh,
and that truck? I definitely crashed it, after underestimating the foot rail
that extends off the back while pulling up to a restaurant, two days before
Christmas. The driver whose bumper I left pathetically crumpled on the street returned
after the holidays to very apologetic note on his window, blurry but still
legible after the snowstorm.
The
truth is, we are a start-up company, and not without the challenges that come
with being new. And it is all coming
together, albeit slower than we had hoped, but that’s not an unfamiliar
feeling: I’ve never seen a restaurant open on time either. We will eventually
complete construction, and when we do, we’ll begin receiving shipments of raw
milk from the farm through out the week, and the creations I dream up will
become tangible.

In
the meantime, I wait for pasteurizers, ice cream machines, cream separators,
and a test kitchen of my very own to be finished. I wait to start making that deep
chocolate milk with Askinosies amazing bean-to-bar chocolate. I wait to use my
newly acquired ice cream manufacturing skills. I wait to fill yogurts with pie.